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Posts tagged ‘Journalism’

An impressive collection of inane and vapid cliches were trotted out tonight with Keown and Shearer in particular drowning out the more thoughtful, and therefore unwelcome, views of Gianluca Vialli.

Martin Keown:

‘Germans are machine-like’

‘Italians are emotional people’

Keown reduces two entire nations down to stereotypes that bared little relevance to what had happened on the pitch. The obvious question is why Humphrey and Keown even needed to be pitch side for these mindless quips as, despite being close to the action, Humphrey offered little extra despite his past work on CBBC, F1 and the 2011 Royal Wedding.

Alan Shearer:

‘He wanted it more’ – here Shearer ignores the good movement of Balotelli, poor positioning of Badstuber and the terrific cross from Cassano instead attributing it to Balotelli simply wanting to score.

Mark Lawrenson:

‘Germany have to score next or it’s all over’ – In an otherwise competent performance from Lawrenson, a slip of the tongue suggested this performance was a fluke, as his stating of the obvious would have had even the least observant spectators sceptical about his contribution.

Special mention also to all the BBC pundits who continue to pat themselves on the back for unearthing the unknown talent of Pirlo, 33, who is now even Shearer’s player of the tournement after successfully watching him for two games in a row now.

England tried and failed with an Italian manager but Ireland’s Giovanni Trapattoni is already a success after getting them this far.

-Daily Mail, ROI vs Croatia preview.

There are a number of problems with this nonsense exceprt. Firstly, it by very essence attributes percieved failure to the fact the manager was Italian, which is utterly ignorant of the 45 previous years of England managers failing to win anything, which, excluding Sven, all happened to be English.

Secondly, it is operating under the assumption that Capello was a failure, depsite recording the best win percentage of any English manager ever, and qualifying for both major tournements something which managers (English ones lest we forget) failed to do for USA ’94 and Euro 2008.

The worst part of all this? This extract was presented as a matter-of-fact introduction to another game’s preview. Whether it is a case of having an agenda, not having enough relevant information or both it’s hard to say, but what is for certain is that this is a case of lazy and nonsensical journalism.